Changing direction.

The most noticeable difference about the new website is the removal of my “Web Designer/Graphic Designer” qualities and a severe change in both messaging and direction.

As it happens, I’ve deleted my copy of Photoshop, cancelled my subscription to Behance and picked up a IDE and Terminal instead because I am now, a extremely proud and happy Front-End Developer for a London based veterinary startup, PawSquad.

Why the switch you ask? Well, that’s a long story… but the short version is that it took the belief and wisdom of both myself and my current CTO to convince me that Web Design is actually not what I get excited for when I wake up in the morning and instead I “light up” when I discuss about the web — especially building and creating websites themselves.

I’ll probably touch on this in more detail in a future article but for now… yes, I’m a web developer — and an extremely happy one at that 😊

Goodbye WordPress

To go along with the brand new site, I decided to ditch WordPress and to go my own way instead.

Yes - as of now, jamesbovis.com is solely powered and written by my own code and better still — it’s completely open source.I’d welcome anyone to take and look at my code, clone the repo for their own use or even better… raise a pull request if you think I could do something better?

I firmly believe that people learn best from the creations of others and open source is the easiest and most powerful way to get started. Learning from others is how I got started in Web Development and it would be an incredible thing if I could help someone just like me.

Other key improvements of saying goodbye to WordPress is that it enables my site to be fast and quick to load for viewers. And I believe most importantly, it allows me to fully display my skills and talent right there on page, rather than hidden behind a big clunky CMS and theme.

Moving forward

All in all, I’m very happy with how the site has turned out and I believe that it is a step in the right direction which supports me skills as a developer and fully demonstrates my own personal style too.

I would also love to write more on Medium. I think it is a great place for people like me to share their experiences and moving forward, I’d like to publish more articles like this one.

Let me know if you’d like to see more articles (even if you don’t, I’m probably going to write them anyway) or if you’d like to shoot me a question, I’m always reachable at hello@jamesbovis.com.